An Extraordinary piece of Sheet music!

As I was on some more of my sheet music digging on the internet this morning, I stumbled across a VERY interesting piece of music, here's what I found:

you may notice who the composer is. Fred Hylands! and this is VERY late compared to the several pieces he composed just under fifteen years before this. And that publisher! Who's "Gibson"?
I haven't any idea...
here's the first piece of the music for those music readers out there:
(I should try to learn this sometime!)

I hope you enjoyed this rarity!

The House Pianists of Columbia, Edison, and Victor

         Many record collectors have recently asked me about the house pianists of the three major record companies of the 1890's and early 1900's(Columbia, Edison and Victor). And from that, I could tell them who the pianists for each of the companies were, and how long they remained at the companies :

     Columbia: Frederic Hylands, hired c.1897 and ended around 1905
    

 Edison: Frank P. Banta, hired c.1896, pianist through 1903 (though, I did hear an Edison cylinder recently that had Hylands for sure on the piano for some reason...)
    

 Victor: C. H. H. Booth, hired as Berliner's pianist in about 1895,  prior to Victor's official formation in 1901 and remained Victor's pianist until 1905
 
    Each of these wonderful pianists had their own specific style and feeling on the piano keys, contrasting from a more rough Brun Campbell style to a perfect classical style. Hylands played very powerfully, with strong octave bass notes, not the best accuracy, heaps of improvisations, but the most natural and progressive Ragtime that can be heard on brown wax cylinders. Banta had a very graceful, classical, and absolutely perfect rhythm all the time he can be heard, quite a contrast to the frantic and adventurous Hylands. C. H. H. Booth is a little harder to analyze, but he could play Ragtime progressively, but not until 1901 and after, unlike Hylands, who was playing his heavily syncopated melodies as early as 1897 (and possibly had known how to do this somewhat since 1893 or 1895). Booth could play the hell out of a march however, he made several piano solos for Berliner in the late 1890's, and all of them are marches, and I have heard one of them. Oh! How he can play that march!

        These three devoted pianists all played wonderful Ragtime, but I would have to say that "Freddy" Hylands takes the cake( get the joke! Cakewalk!)on that matter, and just as my good collector Cliff Kennedy said, "Freddy Hylands is smiling down on you for re-discovering him and mentioning his name at all". I bet he would be very pleased to see that he is being recognized by a few Ragtime pianists who are lifting his catchy and "funky" licks that he played on his records.

Finds from yesterday evening

I was at a fellow record collector's house last night and he was kind enough to make some photocopies of the best pages from a Berliner catalog, and from a book that I WANT so badly. The catalog dates from 1898, because George P. Watson is listed, and he began to make Berliners in that year, and some Berliners from 1898 are listed, such as "Twin Star March" by the banjo duo Cullen and Collins, and that was recorded in 1898.
These are the great Images that I got from him:

explanitory. what's on it says all.

finally, a better image and clear image of George Graham!(he was pretty good looking guy, really)

George P. Watson, a yodeler on early records who is also in that picture of forty-two of Edison's recording artists, in the picture I believe that he is the one with his hand on Dan W. Quinn, with that queer look in his face. (also another good looking guy!)

a very early picture of the Vaudeville recording artist, almost always known on his early records as "Mister Porter", from the first year that he began his venture in the recording business, 1897. about two years before, he, Russell Hunting, and(very possibly) Harry Spencer experimented in the film business, but this venture probably didn't last long, as nothing else from there was ever documented. However, there is evidence that Harry Spencer stayed interested in the film industry until at least 1899, as in The Phonoscope Spencer is advertised as a purchasing agent of not only phonographs, but Kinetoscopes and the films themselves!

         And lastly, I want end with an image that I saw in a book last August but it haunted me until I saw it again last night. It is exactly what it looks like, Len Spencer at about age 24. If I can remember correctly, this is from that book called Lost Sounds which several of my record collector friends have, but I don't unfortunately. I found this page in the book and went "That's where this was from! I have been looking for this picture for over a year!" and I immediately started to read the book, and how it was captivating to me! I kept my friend waiting for a little too long reading this absolutely fascinating book...

even more rare images of early recording artists and vaudevillians!

an odd photograph of the famous tenor Byron G. Harlan, from a piece of sheet music dated 1912, but the image itself is most likely from 1906-1908.

the man pictured above, Frank C. Stanley,  is one of the many performers/recording artists who sang with Byron G. Harlan, Arthur Collins, Billy Murray, Henry Burr, Albert Campbell, etc. He was the one who founded the very long-lasting Peerless Quartette, and is one of the people who is theorized to have first decided to put Collins and Harlan together. This was taken in c.1907.

I know very few early record collectors who know who this man is. He is Bert Morphy(also known as "The man who sings to beat the band") he is known(to the ones who know him) by this nickname because he was VERY loud, they say he could overpower the Sousa band with his loud voice and still be completely understood, he only made a handful of records, here and there for different companies.

the image above is from a TINTYPE from the mid-1870's, of the vaudevillian and rare recording artist "Press"(Preston) Eldridge who began his performing career in 1863. His birthdate is estimated to the early 1850's but has been unknown since the time of his popularity(he, just like Burt Shepard, refused to give out that information). He only made a few records, and they were made in very spread out amounts of time, one in 1892, a few in 1898, and then one in 1909.  

the small image you see above is a photograph of tenor Joseph Natus from a piece of sheet music dated 1900. Natus was the precursor to Byron G. Harlan as a partner to Arthur Collins. 

this is a fascinating rare image that takes a look into the Edison recording studio in 1906, and what I would usually explain is said on the image.

here is an odd image of the famous Ragtime baritone Arthur Collins I randomly dug up from c.1904-05

here is an image of a rather rugged looking Len Spencer(that I'm sure many collectors of his records have seen before) possibly from a record catalog from c.1900-1902. His hair looks so unusual for this time period on this one, it seems like it's just a mess of black hair, different from the photos of him from the 1890's...

and to close off, an Image of the Irish tenor George J. Gaskin from a piece of sheet music dated 1895, so the photograph must have been taken around that time, as it's is VERY sharp good quality, in fact, it looks better than this image did in The Phonoscope, which is from the July, 1898 issue.

                         Great sections from The Phonoscope

          If you're a collector of brown wax cylinders and/or Berliner discs you really should check out this magazine which was(as I previously mentioned) started and mostly written and edited by Russell Hunting, to it's like a direct source of information on early recordings and recording artists, here's a few great little things i took from it(I had so many I had to make a separate folder in my Google drive for it, images I found from it are also here):

                     that's not even all that I found! I hope you enjoyed these! 

This is a fascinating cylinder by Roger Harding(tenor) and Len Spencer(baritone) from around 1898.
This is announced by Spencer, but if you listen carefully, he doesn't sound quite right(possibly a little tipsy to be reasonable...), Roger Harding sings fine on this one, and it's great because Fred Hylands is probably on the piano behind them, as you can hear some syncopation on the piano at the beginning.
here it is:
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/mp3s/11000/11858/cusb-cyl11858d.mp3

                          The Trial Of "Michael Casey", 1896

    Russell Hunting. The man who was known on his hundreds of records as "Michael Casey" to much of the public in the 1890's. He was one of the major recording artists and salesmen of recording's first full decade, but what he is infamous for is experimenting with what he could get away with recording and sell to the public. He began recording in 1892, but not long in that year after he began recording for the Columbia phonograph company, he wanted to try recording nasty stories and ditties on brown cylinders of his. These "saucy" records quickly became a "hit" with coin arcade owners to have in their coin phonographs for 5 cents a play. He still remained on his Michael Casey records, but what was really the up-to-date records were his naughty records. His success remained with these off these records for a while, even if he used several pseudonyms(such as "Manly Tempest)when he made them. They remained very popular until early 1896 when Anthony Comstock and a crowd of his detectives heard about these records. They searched through all of the "Phonograph Parlors"(as they were called) and destroyed as many of these records as they could. They then needed to find the source of these records, who was making them. So in March of 1896, one of Comstock's detectives went to Hunting's home in Manhattan posing as an arcade owner who wanted to buy two of Hunting's "saucy" records. So the man arrived at Hunting's home and told him what he wanted, so Hunting agreed to make a few records from him. Hunting slid on the few brown cylinders and made two naughty records for him. Just after he recorded them the man grabbed him and hand cuffed Hunting and arrested him for violating Comstock's obscenity laws. Hunting was shocked and couldn't fathom going to prison for just experimenting with recording brown cylinders. A little while after a pretty hot trial for its time, Hunting was found guilty for the crime that the detective had blamed him for. Hunting spent three months in prison.
When he returned, he decided to start the magazine The Phonoscope in November 1896. This magazine was his until he went off to England in 1898. Hunting's success became fresh and worldwide when he worked abroad until about 1916.